Nikki Haley’s much-touted momentum in the GOP race for the nomination in the 2024 presidential election has come to a screeching halt.
The Republican’s love affair with their front runner and presumed choice, Donald Trump, destructive as it may be to their party, continues unabated.
Haley has made history of a sort: she has become the first Republican presidential candidate to lose a race to “none of these candidates” since its introduction in Nevada in 1975. While many sources go even further and claim that she is the first to suffer such a drubbing in either party, Politico reports that a similar result happened in a Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2014. The option was a way post-Watergate disaffected voters could participate in the primaries but express dissatisfaction with their choices.
It’s an embarrassing loss for the former South Carolina governor, especially if we consider that Trump didn’t compete in Tuesday’s primary. Nevada doesn’t award any delegates needed to win the GOP nomination and the former president is instead focused on caucuses that will be held Thursday and will help him move closer to becoming the official candidate for the 2024 presidential election—something that for many has been in any case, a foregone conclusion. Thursday’s caucus awards all 26 delegates to its winner.
Haley herself did not try very hard to court Nevada voters. She had said beforehand she was going to “focus on the states that are fair” and did not campaign in the state in the weeks leading up to the caucuses, spending time instead in her home state, South Carolina, before its Feb. 24 primary.
Her campaign, trying its hardest to put at least a neutral spin on the surprising and humiliating loss, wrote off the results. “We didn’t bother to play a game rigged for Trump. We’re full steam ahead in South Carolina and beyond”, spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said.
But there is no escaping the fact that losing to “none of these candidates” cannot be wished or explained away—especially when she finished trailing badly even that nonexistent candidate.
Nevertheless, it’s an equally disturbing message being sent by the electorate to the GOP and they should heed it. The GOP is in great disarray, as evidenced by the in-fighting that has put Congress in a gridlock.
The New York Times reports that in 2023, the Republican-led House passed only 27 bills that became law, despite holding a total of 724 votes.
An analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center concludes, “That is more voting and less lawmaking than at any other time in the last decade,” and the year was even less productive 2022, when Democrats had unified control of Congress. The House held 549 votes in 2022, according to the House clerk, and passed 248 bills that were signed into law, according to records kept by the Library of Congress, including a bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades.
The prognosis is not good for the coming year, as thanks to a tiny majority that requires near unanimity to get anything done; deep party divisions that make unanimity all but impossible; and a right wing whose priority is to curb the government, it’s anticipated that 2024 may be even worse.
The dismal results that Haley received may lead to the rude awakening that has been predicted by so many Republicans, for so long: she may have to finally drop out of the primary race and leave a clear field for Donald Trump and more chaos for the GOP. It may be only a symbolic loss since there are no delegates to be awarded, but it has real consequences for Haley.
